Research Paper

Towards a definition of complimenting

Complimenting is a social value, which is found almost in every society . It has been described as a speech act, which involves taking account of the feeling of others and making them feel comfortable. Complimenting, as one of the ways of expressing politeness, cannot be directly associated with specific linguistic structures without the consideration of other factors such as context or relationship between participants. It is, therefore, a social phenomenon, which involves understanding not only of the language, but also of the social and cultural values of society. The following extract gives a better illustration of this argument.

Analyses of speech functions such as compliments are often circular in that they do not provide information, which would enable one to identify a compliment unless one already intuitively knew what utterances counted as compliments.
( Irvine 1986, cited in Holmes 1988 : 446)

Compliments are described as speech acts, which normally attribute the valued good to the addressee. So, for an utterance to be interpreted as a compliment, it must refer to something which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer. In this respect, compliment can be defined as follows.

A compliment is a speech act which explicitly or implicitly attributes credit to someone other than the speaker, usually the person addressed, for some good (possession, characteristic, skill etc.) which is positively valued by the speaker and the hearer.
(Holmes : 1988:446)

Wolfson (1983b:86), describes compliments as social lubricants serving to create and maintain rapport .They are, hence, social devices used to lubricate or ease communication and maintain a social solidarity between the speaker and the addressee. By complimenting, people tend to establish contact and seek to achieve good social relationships between them.

Compliments are also described as formulaic speech acts in that a very small number of lexical items and syntactic patterns account for the great majority of them. In her analysis of American compliments, Wolfson (1983b) points out that the overwhelming majority of compliments which are uttered by a wide variety of speakers and in a great number of quite different speech situations are remarkably similar both in syntax and in lexicon. So, the fact that compliments are formulaic in nature is a great advantage to speakers, who may come from different social backgrounds, in that it prevents misunderstanding and misjudgment.

For a better understanding of complimenting behavior, a fuller discussion of other aspects is needed. In the next sections, these dimensions will be developed further as I intend to examine some sociolinguistic aspects of complimenting as well as functions it may serve.

A research paper submitted to the department of English of Cadi Ayyad University
in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Licence-es-Letters in English
Year : 1998 - 1999 / Major : Linguistics / Seminar Title :Pragmatics
Supervisor : Dr. GAJJOUT Hassan